Black Armada: Australia and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1942-49 by Rupert Lockwood

So incisive is Rupert Lockwood’s account of Australian assistance to the Indonesian rebellion against the Dutch that Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, Supreme Commander, Southeast Asia Command and the leader of the Anglo-Dutch intervention in Java in 1945, was moved to write to Lockwood, “I have read all you have written with great interest and it explains a lot that happened to us in South East Asia Command Headquarters.”

Rupert Lockwood, correspondent for such diverse newspapers as the Melbourne Herald and Tribune, a journalist in Moscow, radical publicist and veteran of the Petrov inquiry, witnessed many of the events he so vividly describes. He recalls the campaign to release Indonesian political prisoners detained by the Dutch in Australian POW camps and examines the boycotts and mutinies in Australia that crippled Dutch attempts to reoccupy their former colony. He reveals deep-going anti-colonial attitudes not often suspected in White Australia, discusses the impact of the union boycotts on the armed forces and war supplies of the only foreign regime to which Australia has ever played host, and brings to light Australian ambitions for an independent influence in Asia.